Using animals to study heart disease doesn't always translate well to human health outcomes, and human heart cells available for research don't work outside the human body. "You can't keep them alive, much less function outside of the person for long enough to study these processes," said Nathaniel Huebsch, an assistant professor of biomedical engineering in the McKelvey School of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis.
Huebsch is studying cells with a mutation that causes hypertrophic cardiomyopathy (HCM), a disease that can set off heart failure with little warning. Huebsch and colleagues get around this challenge by tricking stem cells into behaving like mature heart cells, inducing pluripotent stem cell (iPSC)-derived cardiomyocytes to behave as if they are grownup heart cells bearing the mutation that causes HCM. They detail their findings in a paper recently published in iScience .
To make stem cells function like mature heart cells, scientists run the cells through a bootcamp of "mechanical stresses." Essentially, they are trying to replicate the movement and resistance a heart cell experiences as being part of a moving muscle. If they attach their stem cells to a stiff interface, the cell has to "work" to pull on it.
The work of a heart cell might also be key to how the mutation causes the disease. Jonathan Silva, a professor of biomedical engineering at McKelvey Engineering and a co-author of the research, said that an electrical arrythmia often affects pe.